Menu

Category Archives: Timelapse

Taken back in October 2015, when I camped near Kalaloch Beach in Olympic National Park in Washington State on my Nikon D700, f/2.8 at 14mm.

There’s a lot of things I love about gifs, but one of the things is that it allows you to capture a passage of time that you just can’t with a static image. This is 5 shots, each 20 seconds, of the Milky Way as it moves through the sky over the pacific ocean, over about a period of 2 minutes.

I don’t know if I can say enough about the night sky. People often ask whether or not it actually looked like this. And it’s hard to say “well, not quite”. Sure with it being a long exposure, it captures the milky way a little more brilliantly than may be seen with the naked eye, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not actually the way it looks. There is so much of this scene that can’t be captured by just our eyes, or even captured by a photo.

Sometimes we just assume that only the things the rods and cones can detect are what is real, but there are parts of the spectrum that aren’t visible to us but are there nonetheless.

Anyway, I’m not sure what I’m trying to say here, except, yes, these photos are real, and they’re spectacular.

I had previously shared a photo taken from one of my timelapse sequences I shot while I camped in the Many Glacier area of Glacier National Park. I finally got around to putting together the full timelapse that I shot while I was there. It was only a few days after the Supermoon, so I had only a short window of time to capture the Milky Way before the moon came out. You can see near the end of the video, as the moon rises from behind me, to light up the peaks and the rest of the scene.

I’ve always wanted to get a wonderful shot of the Milky Way with the mountains in the background, and a reflection off of a lake in the foreground. Unfortunately, due to the movement of the water in the aptly named, Swiftcurrent Lake, the reflections don’t come out very clear, but I guess that’s a project for another time!

This video was shot over a span of about 5 hours. I wasn’t quite as prepared for the cold as I thought I was, so my last couple hours, I was just trying to stay warm by moving and possibly dancing like nobody was watching. Luckily, it was pretty dark so I don’t think anyone else saw me. Next time, I’ll be sure to bring some gloves, a thermos of hot cocoa, and maybe a camp chair!